Losing (the Human) Face: International Law and the Instrumentalization of Development against Palestine

[Lara Torbay is a PhD candidate at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.]

Recent developments in Gaza reveal the ways in which development cooperation – a putative expression of solidarity – can function as a neocolonial tool. Of course, the weaponization of development cooperation is not new: post-development scholars have highlighted and criticized it arguing that, against colonized peoples, development cooperation cannot function as anything but a weapon. As I argue in this post, the weaponization of development cooperation is also facilitated by international law. Post-colonial critiques can thus apply to both development cooperation and international law, the two human faces of an international order that has failed to protect Palestine from the Israeli attacks that have led to the intensificiation of a generation-long siege of Gaza. 

U.S. President Donald Trump’s plans for Gaza might constitute the most evident manifestation of the weaponization of development against Palestine. Trump has presented several such plans over the years. In February 2025, during a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he proposed to ‘take over’ Gaza. The U.S. was to ‘own’ the Gaza strip and develop it economically, creating ‘thousands and thousands’ of jobs by shaping Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East”. Such calls are not new; turning Gaza into ‘the Singapore of the Mediterranean’ was already considered by some as a desirable aim at the time the Oslo Accords were discussed. Trump’s vision for the future of Gaza was captured in an AI-generated video displaying ‘Trump-Gaza’ as a Dubai-style city: full of casinos, expensive cars, belly dancers, and beaches – with money falling from the sky and a giant golden statue of Trump as the centrepiece. 

A few months later, in October 2025, Trump presented his 20-point Gaza Peace Plan (officially known as President Donald J. Trump’s Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict). The plan, which came into force on October 10, foresees the disarmament of Hamas (point 1 and 13); the transitional governance of Gaza by a Palestinian committee, itself supervised by the ‘Board of Peace’, a new entity headed and chaired by Trump (point 9); and the deployment of an International Stabilization Force (ISF), a vetted Palestinian police force. It was noted that while Trump’s Gaza Peace Plan emphasises security and governance, the plan significantly focuses on development. Gaza is to follow “a Trump economic development plan to rebuild and energize” the region, with stability needed “to attract and facilitate these investments that will create jobs, opportunity, and hope for future Gaza” (point 10). 

The Gaza Peace Plan was firmly criticized for being a cynical attempt to “transfor[m] destruction into an investment frontier”. Turner points out that Gaza is not understood as “a society that has endured a genocide, but a problem space to be restructured and monetized”. It is treated as a terra nullius “where land is owned by no one, ripe for the taking ”, making dispossession and forced displacement an integral part of the ‘peace plan’. The plan also evidently lacks the reciprocal compromises needed for a successful peace agreement. Most evidently, it is colonial – and illegal – advocating for international trusteeship of native land. The plan arguably proposes to occupy the territory of Gaza within the meaning of Article 42 of the 1907 Hague Regulations. Similarly, Karaoğlu argues that Trump’s plan “amounts to the establishment of a second Mandate administration”. As Al-Attar (2025) writes, “we are faced with colonial logic at its most raw: dictating a people’s future under the threat of extermination”. 

Despite the force of the critiques raised against Trump’s 20-point plan, the UN Security Council endorsed it in Resolution 2803 one month later. The UN’s endorsement is baffling at best, appearing to sanction Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine. Though the occupation of Gaza by Israel is explicitly ruled out by Trump’s plan (point 16), both the resolution and the plan itself tell another story: not only are Israeli and Egyptian troops expected to indefinitely play a significant role in Gaza, but the resolution also cedes part of Palestinian territory to Israel as a ‘security parameter’. As Burgis-Kasthala argues, “this Resolution seeks to construct a potentially illegal regime of US-backed territorial annexation of the Gaza Strip … This is conquest under the auspices of the UNSC with the backing of many Arab regimes”. In the resolution as in Trump’s plan, Palestinians are not subjects with a right to self-determination; rather, self-determination is represented as a privilege to be earned.

We Were Warned: Trump’s Gaza Plan in light of Post-Development Thought

This instrumentalization of development cooperation towards colonial aims is not surprising. Far from a paradigm shift, the selective and self-interested mobilization of development has always been part of its practice, denounced by development scholars and activists for decades. The post-development framework, first elaborated in the early 1990s by the likes of Arturo Escobar and Wolfgang Sachs, posits that the discourse of development shapes North/South relations according to a profoundly Euro-American centric worldview. This post-colonial infused critique argues that development serves Western interests by disguising neocolonial projects as a manifestation of altruism and solidarity. In doing so, it generates expert knowledge and development jargon, which depoliticizes North/South power asymmetries and wealth inequalities. According to the development discourse, there is no need for politics: technocratic knowledge will provide the solutions that make dignity for all possible, without the need to meaningfully alter the status quo. 

The post-development critique captures Trump’s Gaza plans; in fact, the analysis so befits the present international landscape that it borders on divination. While post-development thinkers argue that development is a continuation of colonialism and a threat to autonomy, Trump declares that the U.S. will “own” and “take over” Gaza only a few months before rolling out a development plan entirely excluding the participation and interests of the Palestinian people. Similarly, post-development’s insistence on the anti-democratic, inherently technocratic, and depoliticizing nature of development materializes in Trump’s 20-point plan which foresees “temporary transitional governance of a technocratic, apolitical Palestinian committee” (point 9). Further, Trump spoke of Gaza as a “demolition site” ready to be developed, after having funded the domicide that destroyed the region’s built environment – echoing the post-development claim that development discourse forms the object of which it speaks. Additionally, development involves the homogenization of the world following a U.S. American- and Eurocentric societal and economic model. This is made flagrant in Trump’s declaration about turning Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East” and the plan’s insistence on relying on experts who birthed other undifferentiated “miracle cities” in the Middle East. Places are interchangeable while the imposed model remains fixed: development flattens complex and diverse realities into a set of universal economic proposals, prepackaged in the language of future prosperity and peace. 

The post-development framework aptly fits the ways in which development cooperation has been weaponized against Palestinians long before Trump. Development in Gaza has always been a senseless endeavor, a kind of cruel optimism: the promises of development are consistently renewed, despite the impossibility of their fulfillment on occupied land systematically under siege. According to Ziadah, development in Gaza shows “how international development could be used to manage settler-colonial violence and political crises, sustaining life just enough to avert total collapse, while leaving the root causes untouched.” Ziadah further argues that aid has been used as a tool of control, conditioned on Palestinians’ adherence to donor-set metrics. This is a fortiori the case in a context where decades of economic blockade has rendered the population of Gaza dependent on aid for its survival, leading to a kind of ‘donor-led austerity’ further limiting Palestinians’ autonomy. Development thus sits in continuity with the settler colonial project of suffocating self-determination in Palestine and disciplining its population. In this context, development aid and ‘security’ converge, merging to serve as a pacification tool. 

As Ziadah writes, “What is unfolding is not simply the destruction of a territory, but its strategic reconfiguration: an exercise in spatial and demographic engineering designed to clear the ground for new regimes of capital accumulation and political control”. Trump’s plan is thus the next step of this long and brutal process of reshaping and controlling Gaza, selectively using development aid as one technology of control among many – while otherwise undermining the global development architecture. In the Palestinian context, development functions as a continuation of warfare and control, rather than its antithesis. This is in line with much of post-development thought, which represents a highly pertinent lens through which the relationship between Palestine and development can be analyzed and understood. It offers a framework within which Trump’s Gaza plans can be understood not as a paradigm shift, but as a continuation of longstanding patterns of aid weaponization. 

Losing (the Human) Face and the Political Project of Abandonment

Trump’s Gaza plan and its endorsement by the UN Security Council are deeply worrying. They are not, however, new trends: we have been warned, time and again, of what was to come. Though the violence currently inflicted on Palestine and its neighbors is striking, the mechanisms that enable it have long been analyzed and denounced. These mechanisms include development and international law: both a priori encapsulating values of solidarity and justice, they have often been mobilized in support of imperialism. Development and international law promise a better future without having to fundamentally disrupt things as they are; they soften the outlook of neoliberal necropolitics without disrupting them. 

Development cooperation and international law find themselves in a profound legitimacy crisis – Palestine serving as the great revealer, an unignorable litmus test. Though the trends we are seeing are not new, they are intensified and worsened. Trump’s Gaza plan and its endorsement indeed represent a turn towards a more aggressive kind of imperialism and settler colonialism. Confronted with the obvious coloniality of both development and international law, the pillars of the international order’s legitimacy are endangered; we might be losing its human faces. 

We were warned long ago that this is what the human faces of the international order do: they seek to maintain an untenable status quo and inevitably crumble – only to reinvent themselves, differently packaged, barely modified. This is indeed not the international order’s first unravelling yet it has, until now, always managed to keep its most fundamental elements – North/South asymmetries, liberalism, foundational binaries – intact. The aim is thus to consciously and thoroughly abandon past international law and development practices – thinking them together, as the misleading, jolly Janus face of the international order. This is the political and intellectual project that the horrors inflicted on Palestine demand: that of purposefully letting go of the institutions, practices and concepts that enabled them – and ushering the genuinely, liberating new.